144836 - Mozilla sometimes eats GOBS of memory at startup and won't start at all

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Andre' F. Braga]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0+) Gecko/20020514

I really can't reproduce this all the time (and hadn't tried to) but it happened
twice already (two different user accounts).

What I did:
1) renamed my preferences folder to something else (say, c:\documents and
settings\me\application data\mozilla to [snip]\mozilla0)
2) started Mozilla
3) closed Mozilla
4) moved mail and bookmark from the old prefs folder to the new one.
5) started Mozilla

after ~15 seconds Mozilla hadn't opened its window, processor usage is low, hard
disk activity is very high. Opened Task Manager and it shows Mozilla eating up
to 250MB+ of virtual memory space, main memory usage was about 50MB, and both
kept increasing (main memory was being flushed to virtual all the time, so it
was about constant when 50MB was hit). Had to manually kill the process...

After restarting, it behaves normally again.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

If you uninstall and delete the chrome directory under the program installation
dir - before installing a new build: Does that help?

Comment 2

[Bill Mason]

Resolving as we had no reply from reporter.
Reporter, if you still have this issue in a current build, please reopen and
comment with details.

Comment 3

[Andre' F. Braga]

It happened again.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020908

What kind of additional details do you want? I fired Mozilla, it took some 5
minutes doing absolutely nothing other than being swapped to VM due to the
obscene amount of RAM it allocated (more than 250MB, and it kept going!)... Had
to kill it. Before that, I wasn't paying attention and it failed by itself.

I have a nice Dr. Watson stack crawl, however it's too big to fit the 64k limit
for bug reports...

BTW, that bug of Mail and Newsgroup not showing anymore is back. The Window menu
shows a blank, untitled second entry when I invoke M&N. Evil.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Have you installed Mozilla in a clean directory ?
Have you also tried a new profile ?

Comment 5

[Andre' F. Braga]

Yes, it was a clean install from the mozilla-win32.zip

Nope, I was using the same profile.

The weird thing is that this very same bug has happened 4 months ago, but hasn't
re-surfaced until now.

Comment 6

[Andre' F. Braga]

Related to bug 145441 ?

Comment 7

[Andre' F. Braga]

BTW, it worked when I tried a new profile.

Not a comfortable workaround...

Comment 8

[yuexiang]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910

Encountered this same bug, virtual memory usage went upwards of 256MB before I 
killed it with Task Manager. It seems to affect the startup of both Mail/News 
and the Browser.

Did a clean install but bug was still reproducible.
Bug disappears when used with a new (clean) profile.

Workaround:
1. Rename XUL.mfl in mozilla dir
2. Problem disappears when Mozilla rebuilds the file.

The bug is reproducible on a clean install if XUL.mfl is replaced with the 
original one present when the bug was first encountered.
File available for reference, 2.48MB (592KB zipped).

I believe it's related to bug 167034?

Comment 9

[yuexiang]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020914

The bug is NOT reproducible on a fresh install of the above build.
Mozilla manages to start up as per normal and the "buggy" XUL cache is overwritten.

Comment 10

[Michael Lefevre]

resolving WFM based on reporter's comment 7.

reporter: if you can reproduce this bug with a recent build of mozilla (for
example, 1.2), please reopen this bug and give details. thanks.